Caution about updating BIOS in Lenovo systems (not a Retrospect issue)

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This post is not about Retrospect, but I'm posting this in case anyone here who is a system admin or network admin runs into this problem with updating a Lenovo BIOS.

If you have recent my recent postings, you may know that a Retrospect support engineer recently asked me to update the UEFI BIOS in my Lenovo T 560 laptop.  He even gave me the exact link for the page for BIOS updates for my machine.  (Kudos to Marc!)

Since Windows is not running on the laptop, I download the ISO file which would be  used for a CD or USB boot, to run the BIOS update.  It turns out that an ISO file isn't really an ISO file where Lenovo is concerned.  I could not create a bootable USB drive using that ISO file using Rufus, a standard tool for this purpose.  Yesterday I spent well over one hour,  on hold and talking to five separate people to ask for help or some workaround with the ISO file.  The final answer was, "Since you machine is out of warranty, we won't help you, and NO!, you can't talk to a supervisor."  This is incredible.  I never heard of a hardware vendor who effectively limits BIOS update support to the one-year warranty period for the system.

After that I posted to a Lenovo forum, and almost immediately a very help guy posted a response, giving me a link to another thread, which explained in detail how to use the Windows executable running on a different system to create a bootable USB.   https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Other-Linux-Discussions/Update-ThinkPad-BIOS-with-bootable-flash-drive/ta-p/3743440.   Once I followed this procedure, I was able to update the BIOS without incident.

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